Jinamanjari 1996 04 No 13

Author(s): Jinamanjari
Publisher: Canada Bramhi Jain Society Publication

Page 64

They in turn felt insulted and waged war on Kumbha. Horrified by the bloodshed, the princess Malli convinced her father to invite all the kings to the palace. When the warring kings entered the royal chambers, they were confronted not only by Malli, but by a golden life-like stature of the princes. Malli proceeded to open a lid on the statue's head to expose rotting garbage. To wit she explained, that like the sculpture, beneath her own exterior there was nothing but fouled and filthy matter. She then made a solemn vow to renounce all worldly pleasures in order to take up the life of an ascetic. It was at that moment that she became enlightened (kevalajnana). Her royal admirers, duly shamed and remorseful, then realized that true happiness lay in meditation and the performance of austerities, and they, like Malli, renounced the world for a life of asceticism.69 The Digambaras claim that the nineteenth tirthankara was not a woman, but a man named Mallinatha who lived out an ordinary career as a male Jina. 70
The Jina Malli was a central figure in later polemical debates between the Digambara and Svetambara traditions. According to Svetambara legend, Malli, in a former life, was a king named Mahabali. He undertook a vow of renunciation along with seven other Jaina mendicants with the understanding that they would perform their ascetic practices as a group progressing at the same rate. The customary list of austerities included fasting:
Mahabali was by nature deceitful and constantly found excuses (such as ill health) to skip meals and thus broke the agreement by deviously accumulating a larger number of fasts than his friends. His conduct was otherwise faultless, and as a consequence of his great exertions in leading a holy life he generated such karmic forces as would yield him rebirth as a would-be Jina 71
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